


Black Feathers, Green Eyes

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: The Witness (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21734560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: She’s been alone on the island for a long time.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Writing Rainbow Green





	Black Feathers, Green Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).



i

She’s been alone on the island for a long time. How long exactly the crow does not know; those early days after she first awoke and stumbled out from darkness and into searing light, have taken on the quality of a half-remembered dream. And not always a pleasant one. They were fraught, those early days, back when she couldn’t be certain what manner of people might live in such a place and allow it to fall into ruin. Weeks passed, at least, before she began to understand that nobody and nothing else lived there, not even birds or insects.

It’s a strange place and the people who built it must have been stranger still. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot find meaning in its structures, in the empty echoing factories and the many screens of unbreakable glass. For all the desolation, there seems something pristine even about the places that lie in ruins, as if this is how they are meant to be, as if a time never existed when they were in any other state.

She finds it eerie, how intent this place feels. As if it’s waiting for something. As if it’s held in stasis. Everyone is gone, yet a sense of anticipation remains, the wind stilled as the entire island holds its breath.

A sense of peace falls across the island like a shroud. It’s hard to think, looking upon the ocean of colour in the orchards, that there could be dangers in such a place, but then there is the ruined town, the buildings with their faded whitewashed walls, and the statures, men and women and children, frozen in poses so strange and heartbreaking that surely no sculptor would have chosen them. The sunlight slants across the courtyard, warms the stone until it feels almost the temperature of human skin, and it seems as though life still thrums beneath fragile layers of clay.

One of the statues draws her more than the others. A woman, reaching up towards the sky as if in supplication to her god. If that god ever existed, the crow thinks, then clearly it wasn’t listening.

Up close it’s startling how finely the details have been depicted. The woman’s likeness has been captured so perfectly it’s easy to imagine the statue coming to life at any moment: a couple of flyaway strands of hair, blown across the statue’s face; the impression of wetness shining on its cheeks when the sunlight catches it just right. And when the crow touches the statue’s face, cupping its jaw like a lover, she senses the quiver of life just beneath the surface. She would have sworn there was a soul trapped in this cruelly-shaped stone, and as if in answer she seems to catch a whispered plea on the air, feels it in a prickle of the feathers hidden beneath her skin.

 _Help me._ The message is traced on the air, bound up in the scent of meadow flowers, written in the cracks in the flagstones baked dry by the ceaseless sun.

“I don’t know how,” she says. Except it’s a lie, because she thinks she probably does. Instead she rises up on tiptoe and takes the woman’s imploring hand, weaving fingers of flesh with those of stone, and perhaps it feels for a moment as if those stone fingers tighten around hers, begging her to be fearless, to remember that nothing here can hurt her.

The crow laughs aloud at that.

ii

She’s been alone on the island for a long time. And just as she does not know what manner of people those who built this place must have been, neither does she know what manner of person _she_ is, what her life must have been like before. It has occurred to her from time to time, in her darkest moments, that they might have created her too – that she is as much a construct as their tricksy-clever lifts and bridges, and perhaps created with just as little heed for efficiency and common sense.

Where did she come from? Who are her people? Has she family? Children? A spouse? Perhaps not, because if there was anyone to left miss her, surely they would have come looking by now? Surely she would be able to remember them?

She examines herself for clues, twisting and contorting her body to check over as much of her skin as she can. But her body is a blank canvas: she can find no moles or scars, no stretch-marks or tattoos, nothing but unmarked pristine skin, tender as if newly formed. She can find no mirrors to offer up a true reflection of her face, only the distorted ones found in the screens about the island, which cast back an image of a face the colour of onyx, or olive green, or ochre. They all distort the truth, but offer up new truths in turn.

In a pillar of haematite she sees how her hair falls across her shoulders like the feathers of a crow. Behind her the summer sky has turned midnight-black, so deep she could fall into it and keep on falling, snatched from the surface of the earth. It dizzies her. It feels like flying.

A new truth, or the closest she’s got, anyway.

The first time it happens, it feels like she’s dreaming. Her perfect pristine skin splits like ripe fruit, and beneath lie black and shining feathers. She tears at what’s left of skin that was never truly hers, her mind clear as if this is something she’s done a thousand times before, the solution to a puzzle she hadn’t even known had been set.

When she takes to the air, she feels both more and less than human. On the ground the air is heavy and suffocatingly still, but higher up it’s different, full of currents and eddies that catch her changed body and bear her aloft. Soaring, she tastes freedom, and even though she knows it’s illusory, for a little while it does not matter.

From above she can see the island in all its different and distinct parts, like a treasure map devised by a child. She can see the patterns that remained hidden on the ground, and at first she feels as though she’s party to something secret, but try as she might, the island’s meaning and purpose both remain frustratingly, tantalisingly, out of reach.

When she wakes once more in her prison of skin, she’s so angry she could scream.

iii

She’s been alone on the island for a long time. Certainly long enough to know that time passes strangely there. She doesn’t remember the passing of the days or the turn of the seasons or the passage of the sun across the sky, yet she knows that they must have happened. Surely she sleeps at night. Wakes sometimes to see the sun rising. Sits beneath the shelter of a canopy listening to the rain drumming on the roof above. She has a memory of the sky burning in a haze of pink and lavender as the sun sets, and the horizon lined with molten gold as it rises once more. She has seen this. She _must_ have done. Yet she cannot point to a single specific memory of such things, only the sun at its height, turning the trees to fire and baking her back dry after she’s swum.

It makes matters… complicated.

She tries to keep a record when she first came to the island, scratching a tally mark each day on the base of a pillar. It works for a while, the crow dutifully scratching a mark in the stone with a knapped piece of flint she discovered down on the beach. But gradually she starts to miss days, or forgets whether she had already made a mark that day, and then she stumbles across another cluster of marks on a different pillar, etched by some hand other than her own.

Perhaps it should console her to know that someone walked this island before her.

It doesn’t.

iv

She’s been alone on the island for a long time. She uses her voice so little it grows husky with disuse. It feels wrong to speak aloud when the island itself is so silent, echoing with nothing but her footsteps, the muted sound of the surf. She never speaks above a whisper. Until one day, drunk on grief and loneliness, growing blind to the beauty and serenity of her prison, seeing nothing but the well-worn paths that do nothing but mark out the contours of her cell and which lead her without fail, without mercy, to hidden messages she cannot decipher and tests she cannot comprehend, she begins to scream, kicking out with bare feet at the trees, hitting at their screens and machinery.

She rages at her prison and at the captors she’d never known until her voice cracks and the feathers begin to tear their way through fragile new-formed skin. She begins to run, takes two steps and then she’s in flight, shaking off her human self and losing herself in the wind and the sun and the air.

This time she turns towards the coastline and flying out over the sea, not turning back even when her wings are aching and she knows she hasn’t the energy to return safely. It doesn’t matter. She swears that she isn’t going back. That she’ll keep flying until she finds a means of escape.

But there’s nothing to be found: no land, no ships. Nothing but the unending horizon, the haze of clouds and the piercing sunlight shining on the water below.

Gradually her strength fails, and she dips down, spiralling towards the snatching waves. She’s even too weak to return to her human form. And as the waves reach up to claim her and claw her under, she might almost be relieved, except that she knows when she wakes up she’ll be back on the island. That she’ll wake up lying on sand so hot it scorches the skin. Alive, but still imprisoned and eternally alone.

But this, of course, is before the other one comes.

v

She’s been alone on the island for a long time. She’s so used to being the only one that the distant metallic clang of a lock opening takes her by surprise. She’s in her crow form, high over the sun-bleached temple when she hears it, and wheels at once, turning back inland. She reaches the garden in time to see the other one come stumbling out from the dark maw of the corridor, blinking in the sunlight. She shades her eyes as she looks around, and her presence in this place – this place where _nothing_ lives – is so unexpected that the crow reacts with an atavistic little shiver of alarm. She finds a perch where she can watch unseen, thinking this other one must be a spy, must have been sent by the crow’s captors.

“Hello?” the other one calls, her voice high and clear. “Is anyone there?”

And: _No_ , the crow thinks, ruffling her feathers in fear and rage. _No no no._

She watches from afar as the other one explores, hating her for the fascination she shows in a world that to the crow has long grown stale and dull. Watches as the other one tries to decipher the puzzles left for god knows what reason by god knows who. Occasionally she stills, seeming to sense she’s being watched, and glances around, searching for any sign of movement, any sign of life. She steals the crow’s bed, damn her, claiming the nest of cushions that the crow built herself, and finds the tally of days that the crow scratched at the base of the pillar, when she was foolish enough to think keeping track of the unchanging days might help. The other one runs her thieving fingers over the tally marks, leaning forwards to study them, her back hunched and her head down while the crow glowers at her back.

Until the other one speaks.

“I know you’re there,” she says.

The crow freezes.

“I won’t do anything to hurt you.” Which is a lie, of course. Isn’t she cradling the flint in her lap? And isn’t that exactly the sort of thing a spy would say?

When the other one looks around, the crow has already taken to the air, bursting upwards in a flurry of feathers, of panicked flight.

vi

She’s been alone on the island for a long time. Yet she’s never felt so watched as when she returns to the statue of the woman, bathed in sunlight. She’s found a length of pipe, torn it free from one of the ruined buildings in the town, hauled on it until her palms were scraped bloody and stinging, and when it finally tore free, it clattered on the stone so loudly that she went almost as still as one of the statues.

The sun is blinding. The crow has no choice but to stand where she can see the woman’s face, and stare at her expression of desperation. She hesitates until she sees a flicker of movement behind the flat empty eyes, and then she doesn’t stop to count to three, doesn’t even stop to think: she swings the pipe like a club, summoning up that image of a woman drowning beneath the surface of the stone.

 _I’m sorry I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ She chants the words with each breath, with each jarring impact. The sound of metal on stone sets her teeth on edge and a chunk of stone falls away. She shields her eyes, blinks away the dust.

There’s nothing beneath the surface. Nothing but more stone.

She lets out a hiss of frustration. Feels the urge to smash the statue – _all the statues_ – into dust. She shifts her grip, hefting the pipe.

“It won’t help.”

She swings around. The other one is approaching, but stops when the crow scowls in warning. “How do you know?” she demands, and god how she hates the sound of her voice, how scratchy and unpractised it must sound.

“Because it never has before.”

“I’ve never done this before,” the crow says, but even as she speaks she feels a shiver of doubt. Still, she’s certain that’s true. Isn’t she?

Seeing her uncertainty, the other one nods. There’s a gleam in her eye the crow isn’t sure she likes. Something a little too eager. “You should listen to your doubts.”

 _Like hell,_ the crow thinks, but something’s happening. Now that she’s started talking, she isn’t sure she can stop. It’s as if those first few words have unleashed a torrent, the first crack in the dam. “I thought they were alive. That I might be able to wake them up.” She kicks out at the fragment of stone. “But they really are just statues, aren’t they?”

“Nothing here is what it seems.”

“Including you?”

“Including me. And including you.”

The crow frowned. “What’s that got to do with the statues?”

“Fuck the statues!”

The crow flinches. But there’s something about the violence in the other one’s voice, how out of place it is in this serene, unchanging world – it sparks a memory deep inside her, something that darts and flashes out of sight before she can snatch at it. She stares hard at the other one. Her face is familiar, yet the crow can’t place it, and while she’s trying to place it, the other one comes forward and takes the crow’s face in her hands, much like the crow held the statue’s face in turn. The other one’s eyes are a startling shade of green.

“It was never about the statures,” the other one says. “It’s you. It was always you.”

“I don’t understand what you mean!”

The other one leans forwards and touches her forehead to the crow’s. “Wake up,” she whispers.

vii

She’s been alone on the island for a long time.


End file.
